CFO credits UB for launching success

January 2007

A career in financial accounting might not engender the same
alluring images as a career in, say, film or aviation. But
Margaret Grayson ’78 asserts that such a career can be
“exciting and broad, with no limits to what you can
experience and enjoy.” The doors of her noteworthy
professional life, she insists, all were opened by finance and
accounting.

She credits UB with helping her enlarge her perspective on what
she could achieve. “Without my time at UB,” says
Grayson, “some of these opportunities wouldn’t have
been available.”

Grayson entered the university’s accounting program as a
returning student, married with two small children. She’d
been involved in the restaurant business with her husband and
looked to her college education to understand what she had
experienced. “The real benefit came through my accounting and
finance, coursework,” she recalls. “It was immediately
applicable to our business.”

UB as the launching pad

Perhaps more important, Grayson’s time at UB expanded her
understanding of business and her thinking about career
opportunities. “Buffalo was going through an economic
downturn at the time, and as graduating students, we became aware
that we might have to search beyond Western New York for a
job,” she says.

After Grayson graduated, she and her husband franchised their
restaurant business and sold it to employees through an earn-out
program. Relocation to Florida allowed her to pursue career
prospects there. Grayson began work with Honeywell in Tampa,
gaining experience on very large federal projects to greatly expand
her understanding of cost accounting. “I managed the cost
accounting function for about 30 different plant projects for this
$100 million dollar operation,” she says.

The ’80s were a time of significant merger and acquisition
activity and Honeywell and then two subsequent owners purchased the
manufacturing facility she was employed by. Grayson gained even
broader experience. “With each change of ownership,”
she explains. “The company got smaller, with fewer projects
and employees. We had to wear many hats to support engineering,
production and financial reporting to top managements as the
accounting department shrunk. The new owners wanted to retain
Grayson and offered to pay for her to obtain an MBA. She says the
whole process taught her “that I absolutely love business and
how it functions. I also learned what happens during mergers and
acquisitions and how to raise capital for a company.”

Over the next 20 years, Grayson applied that learning by helping
to develop business plans and identify funding sources for small
and mid-sized companies, raising early stage capital for them if
they were privately held and then taking them public “if
that’s where they wanted to go.”

Hard work and determination pay off

Grayson feels her most significant work in that arena has been
as chief financial officer for two companies: She was the Chief
Financial Officer (CFO) for the Initial Public Offering (IPO) for
CD Radio, which is now Sirius Satellite Radio. Subsequently she
became the CFO of SPACEHAB, Inc to raise private equity capital and
public equity capital following its IPO. SPACEHAB is a private
company that entered into a contract with NASA to build and
resource a freestanding research laboratory that was transported
into space in the Space Shuttle. The laboratory space was allocated
in a public/private partnership between NASA and several
pharmaceutical and other private industry partners that wanted to
do microgravity research. In both cases, she supervised day-to-day
financial accounting as well as dealt with investment bankers, road
shows and other responsibilities associated with going public.

Most recently, Grayson accepted the position of CFO for V-ONE, a
company that was experiencing financial difficulties. The
firm’s Board of Directors contacted her because of her
experience with financing, requesting her expertise to lead a
turnaround for this “distressed property.” According to
Grayson, V-ONE’s financial problems were the result of going
public too early. Although a leader in the design and development
of security software, its cyber-security technology was well ahead
of its time, delaying large-scale adoption by its target market.
After helping V-ONE raise capital as a consultant, Grayson joined
the company, restructuring it over a period of six years and
leading it through a merger that took place in June 2005. She
maintained the position of President of V-ONE’s current
incarnation, the Government Solutions Group of AEP Networks for a
year, post merger and will continue with the company through
December 2007. Her work required that she develop technical
expertise and a thorough understanding of cyber-security. Today,
she is a sought-after subject matter expert in this field. In 2002
she was appointed by President George W. Bush to her membership on
the National Infrastructure Advisory Council, where she currently
serves on technical committees to provide insights and
recommendations to the White House and the Department of Homeland
Security for the protection of the nation’s 13 critical
infrastructures including, telecommunications, electric, water and
transportation.

Grayson is currently an associate professor of finance and
accounting at Hartwick College, remaining a true fan of her chosen
career. Sharing the knowledge and experience of her career with her
students, she maintains that finance and accounting provide a
common language; it offers continuity “when dealing with
business across all industries. You can learn any industry within
that framework.”